In light of a remarkable trend towards renewable energy sources, it is unsurprising that the solar industry now supports 260,000 jobs, which translates to a year-on-year percent increase of 43% since 2011. As solar installers have benefited from the lower costs of imported components and passed these savings on to their customers, the industry's job growth has largely been driven by the resulting increasing demand. This is what makes the new tariff on solar panels stunting to continued growth in US solar markets.

Donald Trump's decision to pull out of the Paris agreement was a good thing, for the Paris process. Two concepts from economics and econometrics, the sunk cost fallacy and the counterfactual, can help us understand this counterintuitive impact. When comparing the outcome of the decision with the appropriate counterfactual, which acknowledges that the election of a climate change denier to the most powerful political office in the world is a sunk cost, it is hard to see how the U.S. leaving the Paris process is not a good thing for the process.